Other People's Houses [electronic resource].

Walls Divide Press A.I.R. Gallery 2020

Open access content

I hope I can be forgiven for looking behind you into your house. I’m curious, of course, in a regular voyeuristic way, because, since March, I haven’t been able to come over and look around in person, glancing into empty rooms on my slow walk to your bathroom. But this kind of nosiness never delivers much, and here too, it is something else that urges me to collect these pictures while we sit in front of our webcams trying our best to carry on despite being unable to be in rooms together. Screen-grabbing: taking a picture of a picture, and then looking closely, tenderly even, at the back- ground—the place from which you originate and return, which I rarely see, which it would be “unprofessional” for me to see in any detail. Now, unable to breath the same air, objects take on the presence typically assigned to people. My furniture and sculptures, but also your things, as far as I can see them back there: your bookshelf, houseplant, stack of letters on a table by the door, the way the light touches your bumpy wall at this particular time on this specific day of the season. I’m grabbing them. They pull me, quietly demanding my regard, distracted by vantages that are abnormally available to me during whatever lecture, meeting, class we are determined to have anyway. Like your 5-year old that tugs on your arm while you are trying to teach from your kitchen table, these objects are the always receding background of our gathering in the impersonal spaces of classrooms, offices, lecture halls. We are far apart, of course. But, in looking behind you, I am right there. Other People’s Houses is included in A.I.R.’s online exhibition and publication The Scalability Project: Cacophony of Troubled Stories, 2020–21, curated by Mindy Seu, Patricia M. Hernandez and Roxana Fabius with curatorial assistance by Kyna Patel.
https://www.librarystack.org/other-peoples-houses/?ref=unknown

Space (Architecture)

Text

Gordon Hall
Mindy Seu
Roxana Fabius
Patricia M. Hernandez